Ninja Theory’s critically-acclaimed Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice has finally got a release date for Nintendo Switch.

The port – which is being handled by Polish studio QLOC – won’t add any new content, but it will support motion controls, which is nice.

The award-winning title will hit Nintendo’s console on April 11th as a digital-only release. It will cost £24.99 / €29.99 / $29.99. It’s worth noting that Ninja Theory is now owned by Microsoft, so this game – along with Cuphead – marks an exciting period of collaboration between Microsoft and Nintendo.

The game was previously exclusive to PlayStation 4, but also saw release on the Xbox One and PC.

Hot on the heels of their GDC 2019 keynote, Epic Games have released Unreal Engine 4.22 as promised.  The star of the show is support for real-time ray and path tracing, the first game engine to offer support for DXR and Nvidia’s new RTX graphics cards.  Another major aspect of this release is on the C++ side, with a new license of Live++ to support improved hot-reloading of C++ code, as well as massive improvements to C++ build times.  The Niagara particle system continues to improve, a new collaborative scene sharing mode has been added in experimental form and Visual Studio 2019 support was added, just a day after release!

Details of the release from the Unreal Engine blog:

Unreal Engine delivers unbridled power to build realistic worlds with the most accurate real-time lighting and shadowing effects – including dynamic global illumination, pixel perfect reflections and physically accurate refraction – thanks to real-time ray tracing on Nvidia RTX graphics cards. Soft area shadows and ambient occlusion provide the finishing touches to ground your scenes firmly in reality.

Our vast suite of virtual production features enables you to speed up your workflow on set with the ability to capture and record complex live performances and composite them in real-time. Entire teams can work in concert to orchestrate and direct scenes live using the new multi-user editing feature.

Every second spent waiting to see your latest creation come to life has a cost – a cost to you, a cost to your users, a cost to your vision – so we strive to make Unreal Engine easier and faster to go from iteration to iteration with each release so you can spend more time tweaking and polishing the experience for consumers. Live Coding brings Live++ support to Unreal Engine so you can go from idea to reality in seconds while you are running your project. Build times have been optimized across the board making iteration times for incremental builds up to 3x faster and freeing up valuable resources in your pipeline.

Be sure to check the release notes for more in-depth details of this release, or watch the video (coming soon) embedded below.

GameDev News Unreal

Valve’s long-rumored VR headset has officially been unveiled, though initial details are incredibly light.

The headset itself is called the Valve Index and, outside of that, not much is officially known. Valve shared a single image to a new Steam page for the VR headset that shows off the name of the device and a couple of other features.

At first glance, the headset features a couple of cameras, likely for inside-out positional tracking, along its front and a physical slider of some sort along its bottom edge. The teaser page spotted by Ars Technica yesterday notes that more information will be revealed in May 2019.

Valve has been a longtime proponent of virtual reality through things like its SteamVR platform, hardware like Lighthouse external trackers and Knuckles VR controllers, and general tools and improvements for SteamVR developer use. While the company partnered with HTC and played a significant part in bringing the HTC Vive VR headset to life, Valve had yet to launch or even announce its own-branded entry into the virtual reality race until this week.

Totally Accurate Battle Simulator is Now Available on Steam Early Access!

Totally Accurate Battle Simulator is a wacky physics-based tactics game. Experience accurate warfare through the ages. From medieval peasants to modern-day weaponry, TABS uses state of the art physics-based simulation to provide you with never-before-seen insight to our greatest battles of history.

A brand new Nintendo Direct presentation has aired today, 1st April 2019, revealing that ‘everything’ is coming to Nintendo Switch.

Of course, if you’ve been paying attention to what day it is today, you’ll probably have figured out that this isn’t actually the case. In what is by far our favourite April Fools’ prank we’ve seen so far this year, IGN has shared a fake Nintendo Direct presentation that’s absolutely worth a watch.

Playing on the common act of port-begging, which we see on a near daily basis from fans who want literally everything on Switch, the video goes through just some of the great games coming to the console. The presentation style, graphics, transitions, and everything are spot on. Bravo, IGN. Bravo.

Let us know your thoughts on the video in the comments below and feel free to check out more April Fools’ day gaming pranks we’ve spotted today.

The Fedora Project is pleased to announce the immediate availability of Fedora 30 Beta, the next big step on our journey to the exciting Fedora 30 release.

Download the prerelease from our Get Fedora site:

• Get Fedora 30 Beta Workstation
• Get Fedora 30 Beta Server
• Get Fedora 30 Beta Silverblue

Or, check out one of our popular variants, including KDE Plasma, Xfce, and other desktop environments, as well as images for ARM devices like the Raspberry Pi 2 and 3:

• Get Fedora 30 Beta Spins
• Get Fedora 30 Beta Labs
• Get Fedora 30 Beta ARM

Beta Release Highlights

New desktop environment options

Fedora 30 Beta includes two new options for desktop environment. DeepinDE and Pantheon Desktop join GNOME, KDE Plasma, Xfce, and others as options for users to customize their Fedora experience.

DNF performance improvements

All dnf repository metadata for Fedora 30 Beta is compressed with the zchunk format in addition to xz or gzip. zchunk is a new compression format designed to allow for highly efficient deltas. When Fedora’s metadata is compressed using zchunk, dnf will download only the differences between any earlier copies of the metadata and the current version.

GNOME 3.32

Fedora 30 Workstation Beta includes GNOME 3.32, the latest version of the popular desktop environment. GNOME 3.32 features updated visual style, including the user interface, the icons, and the desktop itself. For a full list of GNOME 3.32 highlights, see the release notes.

Other updates

Fedora 30 Beta also includes updated versions of many popular packages like Golang, the Bash shell, the GNU C Library, Python, and Perl. For a full list, see the Change set on the Fedora Wiki. In addition, many Python 2 packages are removed in preparation for Python 2 end-of-life on 2020-01-01.

Testing needed

Since this is a Beta release, we expect that you may encounter bugs or missing features. To report issues encountered during testing, contact the Fedora QA team via the mailing list or in #fedora-qa on Freenode. As testing progresses, common issues are tracked on the Common F30 Bugs page.

For tips on reporting a bug effectively, read how to file a bug.

What is the Beta Release?

A Beta release is code-complete and bears a very strong resemblance to the final release. If you take the time to download and try out the Beta, you can check and make sure the things that are important to you are working. Every bug you find and report doesn’t just help you, it improves the experience of millions of Fedora users worldwide! Together, we can make Fedora rock-solid. We have a culture of coordinating new features and pushing fixes upstream as much as we can. Your feedback improves not only Fedora, but Linux and free software as a whole.

More information

For more detailed information about what’s new on Fedora 30 Beta release, you can consult the Fedora 30 Change set. It contains more technical information about the new packages and improvements shipped with this release.

With the expansion of IoT across all industries data is becoming the currency of innovation. Organizations have both an opportunity and a business imperative to adopt technologies quickly, build digital competencies, and offer new value-added services that will serve their broader ecosystem.

Manufacturing is an industry where IoT is having a transformational impact, yet which also requires many companies to come together for IoT to be effective. We see several challenges that slow down innovation in manufacturing, such as proprietary data structures from legacy industrial assets and closed industrial solutions. These closed structures foster data silos and limit productivity, hindering production and profitability. It takes more than new software to drive transformation—it takes a new approach to open standards, an ecosystem mindset, the ability to break out of the “walled garden” for data as well as new technology.

This is why Microsoft has invested heavily in making Azure work seamlessly with OPC UA. In fact, we are the leading contributor of open source software to the OPC Foundation. To further this open platform approach, we have collaborated with world-leading manufacturers to accelerate innovation in industrial IoT to shorten time to value. But we feel we need to do more, not just directly between Microsoft and our partners but across the industry and between the partners themselves. It’s not about what any one company can deliver within their operations – it’s about what they can share with others across the sector to help everyone achieve at new levels. It’s clearly a much bigger task than any one organization can take on, and today, I’m pleased to share more about the investments we are making to advance innovation in the manufacturing space by enabling open platforms.

Announcing the Open Manufacturing Platform

Today at Hannover Messe 2019, we are launching the Open Manufacturing Platform (OMP) together with the BMW Group, our partner on this initiative. Built on the Microsoft Azure Industrial IoT cloud platform, the OMP will provide a reference architecture and open data model framework for community members who will both contribute to and learn from others around industrial IoT projects. We’ve set up an initial approach and are actively working to bring new community members on board. BMW has an initial use case focused on their IoT platform, built on Microsoft Azure, in the second generation of autonomous transport systems in one of their sites, greatly simplifying their logistics processes and creating greater efficiency. More information about this and the partnership can be found here.

The OMP provides a single open platform architecture that liberates data from legacy industrial assets, standardizes data models for more efficient data correlation, and most importantly, enables manufacturers to share their data with ecosystem partners in a controlled and secure way, allowing others to benefit from their insights. With pre-built industrial use cases and reference designs, community members will work together to address common industrial challenges while maintaining ownership over their own data. Our news release, shared jointly with the BMW Group this morning, can be found here.

A rising tide that lifts all boats

The recognition of the need for an open approach is taking hold across the industry, as evidenced by SAP’s announcement today of the Open Industry 4.0 Alliance. This alliance – focused on factories, plants and warehouses – between SAP and a number of European manufacturing leaders will help create an open ecosystem for the operation of highly automated factories.

OMP and the Open Industry 4.0 Alliance are complementary visions. Both recognize the need for an open platform for the cloud and intelligent edge on the ground in the factory. Both highlight an open data model and standards-based data exchange mechanisms that allow for cross-company collaboration.

We’ve been working closely with SAP on efforts like the Open Data Initiative and across the industry on a wide range of initiatives including the Industrial Internet Consortium, the Plattform Industrie 4.0 and the OPC Foundation. We look forward to continuing this fruitful partnership and working to align OMP and the Open Industry 4.0 Alliance. Collaboration is the lifeblood of future manufacturing and the more we work together, the more we can accomplish.

Read more here.

By AppleInsider Staff
Tuesday, April 02, 2019, 03:33 pm PT (06:33 pm ET)

Apple employee Andreas Gal, former executive of Apple acquisition Silk Labs, was allegedly harangued and penalized by U.S. Customs and Border Protection officials when he demurred to device search requests.

Andreas Gal co-founded AI startup Silk Labs, which was acquired by Apple in 2018.

Gal’s run-in with CBP was detailed in an American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California complaint filed on Tuesday, reports Fast Company.

According to the filing, Gal was stopped at an unnamed checkpoint and questioned about his work and advocacy for online privacy. Whether officials followed the line of questioning before or after it was established that Gal was an Apple employee is unknown. It is also unclear where Gal was traveling to or from when he was stopped by CBP officers.

Officials subsequently requested passwords to access Gal’s Apple-issued phone and computer, presumably an iPhone and Mac. As the hardware, and contents therein, are covered by a nondisclosure agreement, Gal asked if he could speak with Apple or a lawyer prior to handing over the information. The request was declined and Gal was threatened with prosecution, the report said.

CBP allowed Gal to pass, but confiscated his Global Entry card and said he would be removed from the expedited screening program.

“CBP’s baseless detention and intrusive interrogation of Andreas Gal and the attempted search of his devices violated his Fourth Amendment rights,” said William Freeman, ACLU of Northern California senior counsel, in a statement. “Furthermore, CBP’s policies lack protections for First Amendment rights by allowing interrogation and device searches that may be based on a traveler’s political beliefs, activism, nation of origin, or identity.”

Gal came to Apple through the acquisition of Silk Labs, a startup focused on the development of on-device artificial intelligence technology. Previously Mozilla’s chief technology officer, Gal teamed up with fellow Mozilla platform engineer Chris Jones and Qualcomm alum Michael Vines to form Silk Labs in 2015.